


Lost From Here

by schmelloffel



Category: Oxenfree
Genre: F/F, post-canon kinda, this is my first work here lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 23:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13087947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmelloffel/pseuds/schmelloffel
Summary: Alex is in the void, with the Sunken. On the other side, they’re not so scary— just ordinary men trapped in a space that shouldn’t exist. So what if they want out? You would too.





	Lost From Here

“We sunk” says the blond haired officer, and his sad smile fills the air.

The blond-haired officer said his name was Hank Stein, and that he was a lieutenant junior grade in the United States Navy, and that he was dead.  
There are others, so many many others. Hank and Steve and John and Mike and Romeo and Tommy and Tony and and and 

They’re all dead. They died when the USS Kanaloa hit the sea floor and exploded. They died and lost the ability to do anything in the physical world but force their way through in sharp and stuttering gasps. Eternity was theirs.

They all want to tell her how they died.

“Right here” says Torpedoman’s Mate Sidney P Henries. He points at his chest. “I got a steel spar right here, and it hurt. Hurt a lot.”

“I’m sorry” says Hank Stein. “I didn’t want this. We didn’t want this. I’m so goddamn sorry, so—“

She can’t listen to them.

The submarine captain has grey hair and blue eyes. He tries to talk to her. She is alone.

“We were scared” says the radio officer, Lieutenant Frank Simmons. “We were just trying to get out of this place! Do you know how lonely it’s been, how terrifying, how empty? And then you came along, and you were warm, and you were alive, and you—“

“I had a wife once” says a chief petty officer. “I had a daughter and they’re all dead. You’re about her age. You could be her.”

“You can’t blame us, you really can’t” Commander Percy Michaelson was the XO. “We didn’t have a choice. We wanted a choice. That choice was stolen.”

One of the officers quotes a poem at her.  
“We are done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth”

She can’t concentrate. The void is there. The submarine explodes in the distance. The men die, and they eat canned rations and smoke cigarettes and watch themselves die over and over and over.

“That’s me” an enlisted man laughs, pointing at an arm as it floats by. His smile seems to say, what else can you do.

“I wish you had never come here. Then maybe you wouldn’t have tempted us, the way you do.” The Master-at-Arms disassembles his pistol as he speaks, a 1911A1.

They feel her arms. They touch her hair. She watches the submarine explode and doesn’t feel anything.

“I love you” says an engineer’s mate.

“I hate you” says a fireman.

“Now you’re like us. Now you feel how we feel. Now you see how we see. And someday some warm and wondrous child will walk through this blasted waste, and I swear to the God who left us down here you’ll do the same as we did. I promise you that. And don’t you ever judge us again.” The Skipper’s voice is full of rage, hurt, disappointment.

“I guess you left your girlfriend there” says a gap-toothed Louisianan sonarman. “I had a cousin who was like you. She had a girlfriend. Now she’s dead, I guess, but she ain’t here.”

Alex isn’t there either, not really. She’s in Nona’s room, forcing herself through the radio waves, drawing a crackling arm around her small body, light and muscled and shaking like a bird’s every night.

“She’ll never love you again” says Cornelius Digby, from the medical department. “That’s just how it goes. You’re here. She’s there.”

But Alex can’t give up, and one night she is there. Nona is in her arms, nestled tight, and she takes trembly bird breaths and tosses and mutters, and her strong hands hold Alex’s arms, and in garbled sleep mutters she swears Alex is not getting away this time.

The crew are all there too, not the red-eyed desperate shapes they usually wear, but their real selves, crow’s feet, bad tans, boat beards, rumpled dungarees and oilskins and khakis. They stink (submarine stink) and chuckle and scratch their matches on Nona’s dresser, they take deep breaths of real air, and for a few hours it’s like they’re alive again. Alex has no privacy, but the crew don’t care.

She’s stopped thinking of them as The Sunken, that frightening amorphous body of static and yearning. They’re the crew of the USS Kanaloa, men who found a stark and brutal death long before they were supposed to die. Things are clearer, somehow, on the other side. Motives crystallize— the chance to hug a daughter again, or visit parents’ graves. 

It happens more often now, as she and they are pulled through the curtain for longer and longer periods, until the world softens and the universe lets her go and she wakes up stiff and bruised inside a cave. 

In hospital and out, Nona showers her with kisses, as soft, light and strong as the woman she is, and murmurs declarations from somewhere inside Alex’s warm stomach, her head pressed close. 

The crew are with her still. They’re not quite so scary now that she knows their names. The officer who quoted the poem finishes his stanza.

“God help us, for we knew the worst too young.”


End file.
